Four Views
by Myranda Kalis
Summary: Multiple short pieces written for D. Grayman fandom, assorted pairings and themes.
1. Chapter 1

Prompt #2: Bric-a-brac (Ravi) 

The Bookman's private study was, and had been for some decades, the Black Order's favored repository for vast quantities of what could only be described as _stuff,_ crammed floor to ceiling and in no order comprehensible to his several apprentices. (He never did get around to teaching any of them the innermost secrets of his unique filing system, and in that he was at least as perverse as as his own mentor and possibly every other Bookman from the dawn of time onward.) The Old Man could never bring himself to throw anything written away, no matter that a single reading inked it indelibly into his mind, not hideously purple penny-dreadfuls nor crumbling newspapers from the late 1800s, not file-boxes full of records belonging to Exorcists dead almost a century nor letters yellowed and faded almost to translucence. His apprentices, his successors, forced to clean the place out in the days following his funeral Mass, could at least understand that. The sacred nature of the written word was an article of faith for their particular calling. (Successors, in the plural. He could also never bring himself to choose just one of them, and so he'd dodged the choice and named them all as the heirs to his office. No one was more shocked than they.)

What the four newly minted owners of his chambers and their contents could not quite comprehend was why he'd kept all the other rubbish that had been foisted off on him. Books and records and documents were one thing, but the ancient grandfather clock sitting in the corner had never worked in their living memory, its dusty hands frozen permanently at 8 o'clock, taking up space that could have been used for another bookshelf. It took them three days to find someone willing to help them haul all the boxes of broken machinery down the steps to the rubbish room. Bits and pieces of random bric-a-brac kept turning up as they cleaned and sorted and debated what to keep: no less than six identical coffee mugs painted with a particularly disturbing cartoonish rabbit, most of them broken and laboriously pieced back together and glued; an assortment of the bulky old communications headsets and nonfunctional wireless golems curled up into little black golf ball sized navigation hazards, practically invisible once they hit the floor; a cedar box full of left-handed gloves in a variety of designs, most of which had seen better days; a velvet jeweler's case that held a braided length of ink-black hair tied together with a silken scarlet ribbon. Working diligently, it took them ten days to find the top of his desk and another three to clear out the space around it enough to start opening the drawers.

Inside the top center, they found three things. One was an elegantly carved rosewood box, in which rested a quantity of pulverized glass, a sliver of dark metal, and a dozen withered flower petals, translucent brown-golden with age, the ghost of fragrance still clinging to them. One was a letter, addressed to them. And one was a book, hand-bound, hand-written, hand-illuminated, that they sat and read together in the waning light of the autumn afternoon: the story of five friends, and the sixth, who carried the weight of their memory on his heart and mind all the days of his exceptionally long life.

For a long time after they finished, they sat quietly, surrounded by the scent of dust and machine oil and the ghosts of a past their teacher had never spoken of aloud.

"You know what this means, don't you?" The eldest of the new Bookmen finally said, breaking the somewhat damp around the eyes silence.

"What?" Asked the youngest, who was manfully pretending that it was only his dust allergy acting up.

"...We're going to have to haul it all back up."

Prompt #3: Casuistry (Kanda) 

His life was, as he saw it, not a matter of choices but of principles learned and correctly applied as best he knew how.

_The Way: It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is called a Way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all ways and be more and more in accord with his own._

(He did not hate Allen Walker, not in his heart of hearts. In truth, he recognized that they were not so different beneath the skin. The beansprout had a warrior's steel in his soul, courage and conviction in equal measures, and wore a warrior's scars on his face for the world to see, curse-marks or not. It was the softness the boy embraced that he could not reconcile with the ferocity in battle, the gentle-compassionate weakness that ran through him like a hairline crack in an otherwise flawless blade. He recognized also that that weakness, that flaw, hammered together with the strength, the fearlessness, was what made him who he was and that what he was had not yet been tempered. Or broken.

He found that he did not want to see Allen Walker shattered, but could think of no way to help him avoid that fate without remaking him utterly. And so he waited, and promised himself that he would avenge the boy when he fell.)

_Master: If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is, its basis lies first in seriously devoting one's body and soul to his master._

(It hung between them, an unspoken truth, from the moment he opened his eyes after his long season in hell, with the destiny the name and the unredeemed honor he claimed painted over his heart. His life was his own inasmuch as the breaths he took were his own, and the beating of his heart kept his body and his soul together, and his flesh required the nourishment and rest he gave to it. His life was not his own, for he had sworn the last of its breaths and the last of its blood and the last strength of his soul to the service of a purpose greater than himself, a purpose he would accept death and worse than death to see to fruition. A word from his master, from the man who had reared him from childhood, from the man who had learned how to use a sword the better to teach him, from the man who loved him as a son, whom he could not admit loving as a father without dishonoring the memory of the father he had never known, one word from that man, and he would willingly throw his life away.

General Theodore would not speak that word. Would never. He was not certain if he should be glad of that or not.)

_Death is Life: The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead._

(Ravi always tells him to be careful. What the idiot means is, don't die, but he is also wise enough not to say that out loud. It is a promise that neither can make to the other, no matter what other words might pass between them. He has accepted, as one of the foundations of his life, that when desire and duty come into conflict, duty must prevail or one's honor and one's life are equally worthless. The honor, battered as it is by generations of failure, is already somewhat debatable; he would prefer that his end have some meaning. He is not afraid to die, and this is something that the friend who has loved him in spite of himself has not yet accepted. Sometimes he thinks that Ravi will never accept it.

That is fine. There are, after all, some things that he will not, will never, accept. That the Bookman's idiot apprentice should go before him is one of them. But that is something he will never say aloud.)

Prompt #9: Ineluctable (Tyki) 

In war, some things are inevitable.

In war, some are inevitably victims and some are inevitably executioners. And it is said that the difference between being a man and being a monster, between sanity and madness, is the choice not to be an executioner. All of his choices were taken from him long ago, when the blood in his veins first burned with the fever and the memories that weren't his own flayed his soul and his mind cracked from the pain and horror of it and the marks of the killer beloved of God split his skin. Sometimes, in war, one soul's fate is not a matter of personal choice, but of being chosen and living with the consequences.

He was not a victim, and his hands would never again be clean of the blood of those who were.

Prompt #18: Reprobate (Cross) 

Sometimes, his reputation was absolutely not worth the effort he had to go to maintain it. Or the risks he had to take, for that matter.

He was aware, in a somewhat less than abstract manner, that Theo thought he was completely insane and possibly set on dragging the entire Order into madness with him. He was not, but _telling_ Theo that had no appreciable effect; they'd known each other too long for a mere assertion of continued sanity to really qualify as reassurance. Theo, after all, remembered what he'd been like as a whisky-soaked engineering student at University to fully trust him now. Theo continued to be rather disturbingly wise and perceptive.

Preventing his apprentice becoming too attached to him had taken somewhat more effort than he liked to admit, but ultimately he'd accomplished even that. The drinking, the whoring, and the random departures in the middle of the night just ahead of pitchfork-and-torch wielding mobs of creditors had, ultimately, made the kid sensibly reluctant to put much faith in him. So had being made personally responsible for the mountain of debts accrued between Calais and Kalighat. That occasionally poked at his conscience just a bit, though he suspected that Allen's temper might be balmed by the enormity of the inheritance he'd eventually receive as a result of his hard labor.

Flirting outrageously with his own doom had been part and parcel of his personal eccentricities for more years than he could remember. He had, in his misspent youth, passed the dark portals of the Scholomance and emerged with his soul intact, if not his innocence, and his mind filled with truths only a handful of others had ever apprehended. He had supped with monsters and drawn the humanity back out of their blighted souls. He had accepted an irreplaceable gift from the hand of one of mankind's direst foes and buried the consequences of that unlooked-for mercy.

It was, however, a very rare occasion when his own doom flirted outrageously back at him, much less beat him at cards, got him drunk, and slipped into his bed. It was, to be sure, a very beautiful doom, all hot golden eyes and velvety dark skin and dark curls begging to be pulled and a body that welcomed him to lose himself in its mysteries. It lay in his arms even now, sheened with sweat and breathing raggedly, liquid fire eyes half-closed and a smile fighting not to be menacing curling its mouth. He rather suspected, in a few more minutes, it would be ready for another go.

Yes, sometimes the reputation wasn't worth working for. And sometimes it was.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Fine Arts**_

It took twenty-five minutes, precisely, to properly prepare the ink. The quality of the light in his room, on a rainy spring morning, called for blue: the windows, the walls, the bed and the man lying in it, were all washed in hues of palest slate, the colourless stormlight beneath the low-lying clouds leaching everything it touched of vibrancy and brilliance, even his lover's coppery-red hair. The passage of the rain over the thick glass left tracks, cast shadows of a marginally darker shade across the rough-finished walls, the rumpled sheets, the fair skin of a chest rising and falling with the steady breath of a deep and restful sleep. An unintentionally lovely effect, perhaps, but one he wished to capture, and so he slipped from the arms in which he lay and drew water and moistened a cloth, laid a fresh sheet of _gasen-shi_ on the painting mat and pinned it at the corners, ground the ink as quietly as he could and filled his brush with its colour.

The first stroke became the angles of a strong, high-cheeked face, stubborn jaw and sharp chin, half-buried in the pillow. The second became the pale column of his throat and the hard-muscled curve of his shoulder, the third the outline of the arm laid across his chest, the fourth and fifth the lines of his lean and powerful body beneath the linens. He paused to clean the brush and refill it with fresh ink, adding details to the bare outline: the slender arch of a brow, the ridiculously long lashes of his remaining eye, the sculpted contours of his mouth. A shadow suggested the presence of the eye-patch he never removed, even in his sleep. Wide, rough strokes invoked his untameable haystack of hair, plastered to the line of his skull in disorderly whorls and sweat-curled ringlets. Nipples a shade or two darker than the rest of his skin peeked out above the arm thrown possessively across him, rendered in two swift, semi-circular strokes, and the arm itself in a much deeper hue, strokes wider and rougher to mimic the rougher texture of its flesh. The lightest strokes sketched in the barely visible lines of old scars, the definition of muscles in his chest and stomach.

He glanced up from his work, temporarily satisfied, and found his present subject awake and watching him, a little smile lurking at one corner of that perfect mouth. He leant over and kissed it gently. "_Ohayo._"

"And a good morning to you, too." A hand, palm and fingers striped in callus, caressed his cheek, buried itself in his hair, and drew him down into a deeper kiss.

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was rain dripping from the eaves and their quickened breathing. When they parted, he leaned back, feeling the flush of suddenly reawakened desire darkening his own cheeks.

"You're so pretty when you blush, Yuu," The smile gracing his lover's face was perfectly wicked, as was the gleam in his glass-green eye. "Painting again…?"

"Yes," He folded his hands, lacing his fingers together to keep them disciplined, if only for the moment.

"May I see it?" His lover shifted slightly, and he slid forward to block easy view.

"When it's finished, yes." He couldn't help smiling at the disappointed look.

"No fair – you know I'm no good at reciprocating on things like that…all I can do is lay here!" A little pout. It must be something in the weather because, for a change, he found that completely adorable.

"Ssh. Keep your voice down. And you can certainly do more than just lay there." His hands lost their battle with discipline and slipped beneath the sheets, coming to rest on the velvety skin of a hard-muscled thigh. "Do you remember that book you brought me – the pillow-book?"

His lover's breath caught as the hand wandered higher and found what it sought. "…How could I forget?" A little strangled around the edges.

"Then you know what you can do," He leaned forward and brushed another kiss across those delightful lips, cupping his prize in the palm of one hand and caressing slowly.

A little shudder rippled through his lover's body, but he rose to the challenge in all ways.

"The scent of you draws

From me this fire

That I cannot contain."

He was, in truth, a thing of fire, this man who was both his friend and his lover: he could never be cold, no matter the colours used to paint him, he was too full of passionate feeling. It was, perhaps, unseemly in one whose chosen life embraced a middle path, where the only passion he should feel was for the truth, but somehow Yuu could not bring himself to regret the emotions he aroused in his lover's breast.

"My breath is caught here

Against my chest

Finger crumpled sheets."

His lover was trembling, fiercely, the closer he came to release, breath catching in his chest as he tried to simultaneously writhe and hold as still as possible, to keep the arm of the boy sleeping next to him in place, and the boy himself from waking. The bean-sprout needed his rest, after all, given the exertions of the previous evening. A little smile curled his mouth at the memory of that sweetness, the helpless sounds that had escaped the boy as he was pleasured, rather similar to the ones that his lover was making just now, as a matter of fact.

"_Yuu…_" A desperate whimper.

He took mercy, and finished the exchange for his gasping, quivering lover.

"Finished we join here

Only to set the fire

Again to be joined."

He licked his hand clean as his lover slowly recovered, breathing evening out and tremors subsiding. "That was exquisite, Ravi."

"Always happy to be your muse," Ravi blinked the sweat out of his eye and reached back to push the window open, admitting a breath of cooler air, the scent of wet stone and a louder murmur of rain.

And, from the other side of the bed, nestled against Ravi's back, another voice spoke, small and shy and boyishly sweet:

"An open window

Rain scent washes away

The smell of our love."

"…Allen," Ravi asked, after a moment, "How long have you been awake?"

"…A few minutes?…" A head pale as eider down lifted above the sweat-sheened curve of Ravi's shoulder, silvery eyes wide.

"_Ohayo, moyashi._" Yuu smiled, and rearmed himself with brush and ink. "You're next."


	3. Chapter 3

When first they met, she had just turned eight and he was nearly finished with ten, three inches taller and with five inches more hair, easily mistakable for a girl of the same age. It was, in fact, a mistake that she had made, running down the dormitory corridor as fast as her short legs, unassisted by the Dark Boots, could carry her, vision blurred with tears and her unbound hair plastered to her grubby face with the same. Behind her, there were running feet and shouts of alarm, which she was trying her best to escape, and as she rounded the turn toward the next downward-leading staircase, a figure loomed before her. She had a quick, startled impression of pale, pale skin and hair as dark as hers and then she plowed into him, knocking them both off their feet and sprawling in an ungainly pile almost at the top of the steps. She cracked her chin hard enough on the flagstones to see more stars than anything else as she desperately tried to find her feet; she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, and she choked on the taste of it, saltier than tears.

_"Wait!"_ A hand caught at her wrist, at the sleeve of her dress as she jerked her arm free, took hold, jerked her back around and down and held her in place. "You'll fall, you _idiot._ What do you think you're doing?!"

_"Kanda, don't let her get away!"_ The shout echoed from further down the corridor and she tried again, unsuccessfully, to escape, to get away from the small, strong hands preventing her flight, kicking and biting and grabbing a good handful of that ludicrously pretty hair and yanking for all she was worth. In retrospect, she realized that he'd shown an extraordinary degree of forbearance in not shoving her down the stairs since she obviously desired to break her neck, and instead ignored the disembodied hair clinging to her hands and pinned her up against the wall.

"Stop that." He didn't hit her, but his voice, even then, could slap without raising a hand.

She gulped back a sob and let go of his hair, weeping and trapped. In return, he let go of her dress-sleeve and, from somewhere, produced a pocket handkerchief and dabbed at her cheeks. "Why are you crying?"

It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking her own language, even if it was with a bit of an accent, and she flung herself against his chest, wrapped her arms around him, and wailed, "Don't let them take me back to that place -- _I want to go HOME!_"

In retrospect, she suspected she'd startled him. His hands certainly seemed startled when they came to rest on her shoulders, and then began patting her, somewhat awkwardly, on the back. "Stop that. Stop. You're an Exorcist, aren't you? You _are_ home."

By then, other hands were pulling them apart, taking hold of her shoulders and prising her arms from around his waist. His white shirt was splotched with dampness from her tears and his eyes -- such blue eyes he had -- were wide with consternation and one of her attendants was already shooing him away. When she woke later in the day, her head still light and full of air and shadows and disconnection from whatever sedative they had used to calm her, she still had three ink-black strands of his hair wrapped around her fingers.

When she was eleven, and he was almost fourteen, she and every other girl training with the Order, had a desperate, all-consuming infatuation with him. At almost-fourteen, he was at the height of his adolescent beauty; if he'd had an awkward phase like everyone else, no one living could tell about it. At fourteen, he was tall and slender and straight as the sword he eternally wore at his side, the even longer mass of ink-black, glass-smooth hair worn up and tightly contained, lovelier in his pale, exotic way than any of the other boys. And, truth be told, all of the girls, though the girls at least thought that possession of an admirer prettier than oneself would be a price worth paying for Kanda's fond regard.

Kanda, on the other hand, seemed to consider his ridiculous good looks to be an affliction he'd gladly do without, and responded to compliments with the sort of rudeness only a teenaged boy could muster, even if the compliment came from a girl. He was, in general, the soul of chivalry toward his sisters-in-arms but in matters romantical he rebuffed them all with the sharp side of his tongue, often as publicly as possible, and soon his admirers all left him alone, their opinions of him thoroughly changed. They found other boys to lavish their affections upon, boys who accepted those attentions as their due, boys who nonetheless found cruel things to say when Kanda was not entirely out of earshot. They had been his friends, or, if not his friends, at least his comrades, not so long before; afterwards, he had no use for them, and they had none for him. She thought it was unbelievably foolish on all sides, a perfectly stupid thing to quarrel and refuse to apologize about, and said as much to him late one night when they encountered one another returning from the baths.

"It isn't about that," He surprised her by replying, and walked away.

When he was sixteen and she thirteen, he was brought back to the motherhouse dead for the first time, mortally injured in a nonetheless successful battle. The bottom of the boat was puddled with his blood, and the stairs, and on the way to the infirmary, he had stopped breathing and his heart had stopped beating and afterwards there had been a great deal of chaos and excitement and paperwork to fill out when death had refused to keep him. She came to visit him and found him lying in his bed paler than the sheets, covered in flexible glass tubing and machine probes, bruised and bandaged and too weak to even stand for himself. He had been asleep and she went away again before he could wake; she suspected he would hate to know she had seen him that way. She was the only person, she learned from the ward nurse, to come visit.

When next she saw him, two days later, it was as though he had never been injured. He was eating, alone as always, ignoring the looks directed at his back, the just-slightly-too-loud murmured comments, for all the world indifferent. There had been others on the mission, as well. For the first time she caught, in the undertones of the others' words, something other than foolish childhood jealousies hardened into equally foolish nearly-adult resentments. When he walked past her on his way out the door, she saw that he heard it, as well, and was resigned; the look in his eyes made her want to cry.

He was an idiot, she had known that much for years and accepted it; she had loved him almost as long, for being the first to plant the idea in her mind that the Order could be her home if she would let it. That the Order could be her family, her brothers and her sisters, as much as the brother of her blood, who ultimately came to join them, after all. Watching him as he became more and more alienated from the gift he had given to her younger self was terrible, because she had no idea how to stop it. The only person, other than herself, that called him a friend was barely ever there, but when he was, she made a point of going to see him.

"Yuu is...very..." The Bookman's apprentice observed sagely, "Yuu."

"I know," She agreed. "What can we do to make him stop it?"

"Probably nothing." A wry smile came and went. "Do you love him?"

"...A little," She admitted. "Do you?"

"Yes." He touched her hand. "It's...almost as though it's always winter inside him now. Maybe we could do something to...let him know it's time to be spring."

She put it where he couldn't possibly miss it, right next to the glass bell jar containing his lotus-flower: an impossibly tiny potted plant, a tree really, its bark sheened silvery grey, dotted all over with exquisite white flowers. _Ume,_ Ravi had called it, the first sign of spring, the flowers that bloom in winter.

The next week, Jerry served her a plate of impossibly tiny balls of rice, each embedded with a tiny bit of _umeboshi_ almost too small to be seen with the naked eye. When she turned, incredulously, to look, Kanda deliberately avoided her eye, and bestowed his smile instead upon the contents of his soba bowl.


	4. Chapter 4

_**Under the Bridge**_

She wasn't entirely certain, even then, what she had been expecting. She had known, intellectually and for quite a long time, since she had been adopted as a de facto assistant by the Science Division, that i _Nihon_ /I was the lair of their enemy. She had known, but had never permitted herself to think too deeply on what that fact I _meant_, /I and she suspected that no one else had, either.

They were huddled together under the dubious shelter of an overgrown stone arch, the few standing remnants of a bridge long since destroyed by design or neglect. The small fire they'd lit seemed to cast more darkness than light, the shadows outside the flickering circle of illumination taller and darker and more twisted than shadows had any right to be; the grinning-skull moon overhead did little to dispel them. All around them, the dead city of Edo groaned and smoked and settled, restless in its grave. General Theodore and the Bookman crouched next to the fire, conversing in tones so low no one but Mari could catch their words; she supposed it was to keep them from worrying too much. Against her shoulder, Miranda dozed fitfully, more awake than truly asleep and wound too tightly to be experiencing much rest; she took the older woman's hand in her own, held it tightly, and slowly Miranda lapsed into a deeper sleep. Across from them, Ravi sat propped against the straightest part of the bridge abutment to be had, holding his arm close against his chest but otherwise asleep, too experienced a soldier of life to let the chance for rest escape, especially since none of them knew when the next such chance would arrive.

Rinali desperately wished she could sleep. Every inch of her body ached with weariness and her eyes were gritty with fatigue; she wanted to rest her cheek against Miranda's mop of brown curls and let go of her cares, if only for a few moments. She could not, and the reason why knelt a handful of feet away, his back towards her as he waited at the edge of the firelight for Allen to return from his patrol of their camp's perimeter, a silhouette of boy and sword. A part of her was surprised that he hadn't felt the weight of her gaze; a part of her was certain that he had, and was simply choosing not to respond to it.

Rinali doubted very much that Kanda had many memories of this place, the country of his birth and possibly the city; General Theodore had brought him to the Order a smaller child than even she had been, far less than ten, and her own memories of her home and, very much to her shame, her parents were more mist and fond imaginings than reality. She doubted just as much that that made his homecoming any easier to endure, the casual annihilation of half a city easier to watch, the knowledge that there was little enough human left within its walls easier to bear. She wanted to say something to him – she wanted I him /I to say something, anything – and she knew that none of the words forming on her tongue and dying behind her teeth would elicit any sort of response, even should she give them breath. He was I Kanda. /I He would acknowledge grief or sorrow or pain the day after the Last Trump.

Allen returned, stepped back into the circle of light, and Kanda rose to greet him; they exchanged a handful of words, and the older boy stepped out into the night. She exchanged a wan smile with Allen as he came under the shelter of the bridge-span, crossing over to check on Ravi, who stirred long enough to offer reassurance and went immediately back to sleep. Allen slumped down next to him and put his own head back to find what rest he could. Rinali closed her eyes and when next she knew wakefulness, Miranda had joined the General and the Bookman at the fire, Allen slept alone against the far wall and a presence sat next to her, out of the light and less than an arm's-length away. He was not asleep; his eyes caught the reflections of the firelight like sunshine on deep water, his face a mask of shadowed planes. Slowly, she reached out from beneath the Finder's cloak she was covered in, and rested her hand over his own; he did not pull away.

"This place," His voice was almost inaudibly soft, just enough breath put into the words to give them sound, "is not my home."

Her fingers closed tightly, and, again, he did not pull away.


	5. Chapter 5

**Boys**

He knew, abstractly, that he would have to do it again. It was not a matter of 'if' but 'when,' and slowly escalating necessity. He was no longer a young man, and while neither his body nor his mind had yet failed him, he also no longer possessed the luxury of time in which to wait for the perfect candidate to present himself, either from within the clan or from without. Or herself, he supposed. The Bookman, after all, was not always a man, and a girl stood as great a chance of possessing the combination of proper temperament, intellect, and education as her brothers, particularly now.

_There was, in fact, a girl among the candidates the harried Chief of Operations offered him, when he finally swallowed his concerns (his pride) and put forth a request. He opened her dossier, read her qualifications and her instructors' glowing assessments, looked at the sketch of her (huge dark eyes, a sweet-faintly-sad smile, long hair drawn up into a pair of tails) and tried not to imagine her lying disembowelled in a pool of her own blood or bound to a madhouse bed raving mindlessly in languages not meant for human throats. He closed her file and laid it aside, trying not to shudder. From the stack of files placed before him, he filtered out all but two._

"_Which would you choose?" He was never quite certain, thereafter, why he asked. It was not his way to be indecisive or hesitant – in such failings Truth was lost – but at that moment he felt a strange constraint, an unwillingness to act as he knew he must._

"_This one." The Chief ignored both the open files on the desk before him and fished a dossier, considerably thicker than the others, out of the discards pile._

_The boy in the sketch had a ridiculous shock of orange hair and a look about him that proclaimed him trouble looking for a place to happen. His file was thickened by a number of official ecclesiastical and legal documents in which his surviving maternal family formally and permanently surrendered any claim of custody to his person and his new legal guardian (seated on the other side of the desk) just as formally and legally surrendered any claims on the not insubstantial inheritance his late mother had willed him. His late mother had, clearly, been a woman of means. And eccentricities, to her family's very evident aggrievement. Next to her name were the internal reference codes denoting an Exorcist killed in the line of duty._

"_His father?" Because there was none listed, or even mentioned on any of those very formal legal documents, though there was also no formal legal accusation of bastardy, either._

"_Dead." There was no doubt in the Chief's voice and no deceit in his face when the Bookman lifted his gaze to look._

_The boy's qualifications weren't bad by any means, but he preferred an apprentice whose ties were few, whose emotional attachments to others were minimal. "He has been a Ward of the Order for more than a year."_

"_I know your standards on this issue, I assure you." Testily. "There are two other children close to his age in the asylum right now – the young lady you rejected and General Theodore's apprentice, who will be leaving soon himself. The boy's family wants nothing to do with him, and his parents were killed in the service of the Order. Unless you want me to find you an infant to hand-rear, you won't find many in our ranks with fewer connections than that."_

"_True." The boy, at age ten, spoke four languages and read at least six more, a notable oddity. Hebraska had already determined that he possessed the raw potential to Accommodate, but none of the many pieces of Innocence she held were his. (He was also notably unalarmed by Hebraska's rather startling appearance and had asked a number of innocently impertinent questions of the Guardian of the Prophecy, much to her amusement.) General Theodore attested that he was developing a keen eye for detail and an advanced aesthetic sense and all of his other instructors reported that he was, indeed, very bright, very energetic, and very much trouble looking for someplace to happen._

"_Bookman. I promised the boy's mother that I'd keep him safe, were I able. I can think of nowhere safer than learning your trade." The Chief leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "Six months is all I'm asking. If he hasn't risen to meet your standards by then, I'll take him back and you can have both the others. I'll keep them here for extra training in the meantime."_

_That was not what he had expected to hear, but it was not unwelcome for that. "Very well. Six months."_



In the dying light of the late autumn day, the hospital room was silent but for the steady _whhshhh-hmmmm_ of the ventilator apparatus and the metronome regularity of the heart monitor, the sounds of one man still living and four men willing him silently to continue doing so.

It was not a young man who occupied the room's sole bed; far from it, though neither did he seem to fully embody the truth of his advanced age. Yes, his hair had long since given up even the ghost of colour, but it had never lost its thickness, or its wildness, and it lay on the pillow an unruly haystack of white and iron grey and silver. Neither had he bent beneath the weight of his years; the body lying beneath the hospital linens, beneath the oxygen mask and the monitor probes and the IV feeds, was as tall and lean and wiry as a scarecrow, spine straight, shoulders unstooped. He showed his age most in his face, lined as it was with more than ten decades of laughter and sorrow, his remaining eye closed and sunken into a nest of crows-feet, his expressive mouth framed in the remains of more smiles than anyone living could count. It showed in his skin, pale and parchment-thin and permanently ink-stained at the fingertips, though which the faint blue tracery of veins and faded ancient scars wandered like the lines on an antique map. It showed in his current condition.

_No organic cause,_ the Head of the Medical Division had informed the four young men who also occupied the room, two days prior. The Bookman's heart was sound – not only sound, but stronger than some organs belonging to men a quarter of his age. Neither did his neurological functions seem to be impaired; whatever had felled him, it was not a stroke. In his brief and ever-shortening periods of wakefulness, he was utterly lucid, and generally full of pointed instructions that he wanted carried out _at once._ Letters to be sent. Wireless calls to be made. Matters to be set in motion. When they were not scurrying about carrying out his errands, exchanging strained smiles and accepting genuine expressions of concern and sympathy from the rest of the Black Order, his four apprentices congregated in his small room and waited.

They ranged in age from twenty-six to just-turned-seventeen and to a man they had known that _something_ had changed in their mentor but none of them knew precisely what. In January, the millennium had turned and the youngest thought it had begun then: the Old Man had been waiting for something, watching for it intently, and whatever it was had not come to pass. They had stood on the library portico and watched the New Year's fireworks together and etched into the Old Man's face was an expression that might have been relief and might have been discontent but certainly contained within in something of grief and something more of regret. In June, he had vanished for a whole day and a whole night, returning the next day to his quarters without a word to anyone about where he had been or what he had been doing. In August, he had passed his one hundred and tenth birthday and the day after, he had emerged from his austere suite of rooms on the library's lowest level without the most visible symbols of his office: the pendant earrings that contained within them the tiny scrolls on which were recorded the names of all the Bookmen who had come before him. A week ago, at the end of November, they found his chambers empty and a diligent search of the library had found him sitting in his favourite chair, next to his favourite fireplace, unawake and unwakable, a perfectly serene smile curving the corners of his mouth.



The Bookman knew boundless despair during that first month: the boy was absolutely impossible. The boy would absolutely not be silent; he was so full of chatter and questions and rambling commentary on everything and nothing that he even talked in his sleep. Ordering him to be still was mostly productive of short periods of hurt silence and huge-eyed reproachful looks that ended in another barrage of questions about anything he was assigned to read in the meantime. The boy was impertinence incarnate; he seemed pathologically incapable of using respectful terms of address, instead preferring "Gramps" or, even worse, "Panda" to the title. The Bookman regretted his word to the Chief with a painful intensity and made little attempt to hide it, not that his expressed disapproval had any particular effect on the objectionable ebullience of his new charge. Or so he believed, at the time, and assigned punishments accordingly.

"I don't think he likes me."

The words drifted down to him from somewhere in the upper reaches of the library's third floor, the level given over to tiny reading rooms and balconied galleries. He stopped where he stood, and listened.

"Who? The Bookman?" The other voice belonged to General Theodore's admirably taciturn apprentice; not for the first time, he wished, somewhat wistfully, that young Kanda Yuu had as much interest in academic pursuits as he did in killing things.

"Yes. I think I got off on the wrong foot with him and now he doesn't like me. At all."

"Tch. Idiot. He doesn't have to like you: he's your teacher, not your grandfather. Just do as he tells you and keep your mouth shut for a change."

Silence. The Bookman felt an odd, warm little surge of affection for any ten year old capable of giving such sound advice.

Then, softly, "General Theodore likes you."

A somewhat longer silence. In those words, the Bookman heard for the first time the desolation of an orphaned child whose own family hadn't wanted him, and who had no place within the Order or outside it.

"General Theodore is almost as soft in the head as you are." From above a thin trail of dust filtered down as someone scrambled to their feet. "Come on," Gently, "It's almost lunch. You'll feel better once you've had something to eat."

It occurred to him, in retrospect, that there had been a certain tension underlying much of the boy's behaviour: a desperate desire to please that often ended up tripping over itself; a need to prove himself, if not perfect, then at least useful; a longing to simply be wanted or, if not wanted, at least needed. The Bookman could not, in honesty, say that he wanted that particular boy more than any of the others, but he did need an apprentice, and he could forge their mutual needs into something functional, given enough time.

He would simply have to steel himself to being called "Gramps."

The months bled into years. The two young men he had originally wanted grew into men, into Exorcists, and both eventually fell. The boy he hadn't particularly wanted grew into a young man as offensively cheerful as the child he had been, at least on the surface; he grew from bright to brilliant; he found his Innocence in a barrow grave deep in the mountains of the East, forged centuries before the coming of the White Christ into the form of a hammer that commanded the elements. He never learned how to spare his own heart, how to separate himself from the lives and deaths of others, how to remember only what he must and let the rest go. It was the weakness used to break him in the end, to shatter him in mind and soul, to cleave away his heart and his humanity and leave nothing but the wreckage of who he had once been.

"Isn't this what you wanted, Panda? It won't even hurt to watch them all die now."

In truth, by then, it was not what he had wanted. And he had spent the last of his life and his strength piecing together the broken man that his boy had become.



False dawn was grey on the horizon and painting the walls in shades of colourless shadow when the Bookman woke for the last time. He knew it was the last, for the reservoir of his life had been ebbing slowly for months and now that pool of weeks, days, hours was almost empty. In an abstract way, he was glad of it: he had lived a longer life than he had ever wanted and had given nearly every moment of it in the service of others; he had chosen the hour of his own ending, and now that hour was at hand. Around him, the men who would succeed him slept on, oblivious, and he thought it best that he let them do so; they would have enough to deal with shortly, anyway.

"Pup," A voice said, close to his side, his good side, and he tilted his head slightly.

Panda sat next to him in the room's sole unoccupied chair, looking very much as he had on the day he had died: ancient and forbidding and comfortingly familiar, his hands tucked into the wide sleeves of his uniform jacket.

"Geezer," Ravi greeted him, raspily cheerful, his throat irritatingly dry from the oxygen feed. "I wondered who'd come. I bet you had to fight Yuu for it."

"He conceded the honour far more graciously than I expected he would." A distinctly wry pause. "He's waiting outside. Impatiently."

"I think I'll forgive him for wanting me to die that badly." He opened his hand and allowed the jade-covered fingers of his mentor to rest against his palm. "It's been ninety-two years, after all – I rather expected him to start haunting me long before this." The room brightened slowly, sliding from shadow to grey to white and his flesh and soul and mind grew lighter with it. "Panda?"

"Yes, child?"

"I missed you, too, you know."

"I know. Close your eye."


	6. Chapter 6

Hidden 

Somewhere between the Angel and King's Cross, Tyki Mick realized he was being followed. It took a moment of consideration, as he casually wended his way through the press on the crowded midday streets, to determine why he hadn't picked up on it long before: his shadow was out of uniform and doing quite a credible job of blending into the background, just one among many hundreds out on an unusually fine late winter day, a sombrely-clad young man perhaps running an errand, perhaps just enjoying a stroll. It was that ridiculous shock of rufous hair that gave him away; bits and pieces poked out from under the brim of the perfectly respectable hat he was wearing, caught the wan shafts of sunlight passing through the high bright overcast, returned them in flickers of colour bright as a fresh-struck copper obol. One such flicker caught and held the corner of Tyki's eye long enough to earn a full glance, and that was when he saw the patch hiding in the shadow the hat-brim, as his pursuer turned quickly to avoid eye contact. Silly, that. If he'd just continued on, Tyki's eye might have slid past him completely; now he was spotted, and he might not even realize it. Correction: he did not realize that he'd been spotted because he continued to follow as Tyki began evasive manoeuvres and considered options. High-street was thronged as far as the eye could see with heartily winter-sick Londoners, out enjoying the first respite from the bitter cold that the City'd had since January, and Upper-street was very much the same. Plenty of crowd to lose himself in altogether, and Upper-street the far likelier option so far as native camouflage went: most of the loiterers there were young, male, at heels, and milling about on the paving of pubs, billiard-rooms, and gentlemen's clubs of dubious gentility, smoking and indulging in ill-considered displays of public drunkenness and loudly discussing politics in authoritative tones of personal ignorance.

It was not entirely unreminiscent of the bachelor's quarters in the Ark on a good day and it was with a mild pang of something resembling homesickness that he took hold of the brim of his hat with one hand and, applying his free elbow and hand with art and guile, created a distraction to go with the camouflage. Outraged shouts and at least one shoving match broke out on the pavement behind him. Tyki stretched his legs and walked briskly away from the results of his endeavours, a gentleman on a mission not a pleasure-stroll for all the world, and the crowd briefly gave way before him, aiding his escape without the need to even walk partway through anyone. He found a street-level grocery and ducked inside it, browsed among the shelves, found an untenanted corner to walk through and then strolled through the store-rooms of two or three adjoining buildings, emerging back into the watery sunlight in a narrow breezeway that he was obliged to inch down sideways to regain the pavement. He zigged across Upper-street, dodging omnibus and carriage traffic as went, and continued on the opposite side of the street in the general direction of his objective which was, in this case, lunch. More specifically, lunch at one of the less objectionable dining-parlours lining the way, one that had two centuries worth of coal-smut and tobacco-smoke staining the rafters instead of three and a continuously-revolving card game or two occupying the corner tables at which a man might defray the entire cost of his meal in a few rounds.

As he made his entrance into the smoky environs of the parlour, the usual suspects were already ensconced at their usual tables and the usual barmaid caught his eye and began filling his usual order as he found his own seat. He hung his jacket and then his hat on the hook behind his favourite chair at his preferred table – off to one side, allowing an unobstructed view of the door, not quite in a real corner – and turned around to find the Bookman's apprentice already seated across from the spot he intended to occupy. Smiling.

"What circle of Hell," Tyki asked softly, "did you crawl out of this morning?"

"Chelsea, actually." The exorcist replied, removing his hat. "May I join you?"

"It seems as though you already have." Tyki, presently lacking the desire for a scene or a public murder, seated himself, as well. "How did you find me?"

"Trade secret." Under any other circumstances, he might have found the wry little look offered him extremely winsome; given the present situation, he had to tightly control the urge to reach across the table and do something he'd regret. "Let's not play coyer than we have to, shall we?" The Bookman-in-waiting paused as the barmaid arrived and deposited her burden: two mugs of something red and mulled, a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a plate of stewed eels swimming in their own grease. "I'm here to make you an offer."

"An…offer." An entirely involuntary chuckle escaped him. "Pardon me, but I find that rather…rich? Tragically farcical, perhaps? What could the Black Order _possibly_ have to _offer_ me that wouldn't end in vast unpleasantness somewhere along the line?"

"I'm not here on behalf of the Black Order." Quietly. "I speak for myself in this. I want – "

"Yourself." Tyki smiled, and the man sitting across from him flinched slightly. "_You_ want. And what is it that _you_ want from _me_, precisely? And why in Hell should I care what you want?"

"You're not going to make this even a little easy, are you?" The Bookman-in-waiting asked, a certain asperity coming into his tone. "I'm sorry – "

"No. I'm not." Tyki replied, and served the eels. "Keep your apologies. You're buying lunch. And, now, to the _offer_, if you please."

He sampled the fare, grimaced slightly, and admitted, "There's no way to say this without it sounding completely self-serving. I want the truth, and I want you to tell it to me. In your own words."

"You're right, that does sound completely self-serving." Tyki sipped the wine, suddenly utterly without appetite. "I presume you mean the truth about my family. What makes you think that I, of all the bloody descendants of the House of Noah in this miserable world, have it?"

"You have at least part of it. I don't presume you have all of it – but you're the part I have the best chance of reaching." The Bookman-in-waiting admitted with irritatingly admirable candour. "Rho – I'm sorry. Your sister suggested as much to Allen once, and General Cross, after a great deal of evasion on the issue, more or less confirmed it."

"She wasn't my sister." He closed his eyes until the urge to weep went away. "Well. Cross is many things, but a liar isn't usually one of them, I'll give you that. How's young General Walker keeping himself these days?"

"Busy."

"I'd imagine, given all the rumours of not particularly well-concealed warfare on the Continent I keep hearing. Next time you see him, tell him I expect we'll play five-card in Hell one day. Perhaps sooner than later." He opened his eyes. "The memories are the birthright of the whole clan, at least as much as anything else. Everyone has some – even, I suppose, Cross."

"He does. I asked. Eventually, he even told me what they were." Hands spread across the table. "That's what I want. The truth, as you understand it to be. The past, and how it came to influence the present. The _why_ of it all. If you can give me that, I'll – "

"You'll what?" Tyki was beginning to enjoy, in an entirely mean spirited way, how certain shades of his smile made the Bookman-in-waiting flinch and look away. "Protect me from your colleagues in the Black Order? They've a good hundred-odd reasons to be significantly less interested in my living person than you. Hide me from what's left of my loving family – "

"It's true, then."

Tyki felt both his smile and any trace of satisfaction vanishing. "…What else did my bastard step-relation tell you?"

"He suggested that…ah…your family might regard you as…how to put this delicately?…an _involuntary enemy partisan?_" A grimace. "Actually, he told Allen it probably would have been kinder to kill you cleanly."

"He's right, it would have been." He couldn't keep the bitterness from his voice and saw no reason to try. "'Involuntary enemy partisan' – which of us didn't want to be coy again? 'Deserter,' is one word, little Bookman. 'Apostate,' is another. 'Tainted,' is one for the final analysis. Tainted by your boy-General's boundless compassion, even for his mortal enemies, befouled beyond cleansing. He couldn't bring himself to kill me, but he'd take my _life_." A chuckle. "I'll have to wait for my own family for anything else. See? A tragic farce. And now you want me to be a traitor in truth, as well."

"No. _I want you to help me understand._ I want you to help me understand how it came to be this way. I want to put an end to it without the loss of another human life, Noah or otherwise. I want to help put an _end_ to this war, not let it repeat itself, over and over again." Earnest, he was intensely earnest, Tyki would give him that. "You can't tell me that you want the people you care about to keep killing and dying for no reason."

"No. But I think you give all of us too much credit, if you think the power to prevent that lies in any of our hands." He closed his eyes again. "You realize there wasn't an offer in any of that, right?"

"I have a safe house I could put you up in. The Order wouldn't know. And Panda hates the city more than he hates split infinitives and Middle English spellings." A hand closed over his own and he looked up, shocked, into that ridiculously earnest face with that ridiculously earnest single eye that missed little and forgot nothing. "Will you help me?"

"Nothing good can come of this. Yes. Damn you, yes."



"…Ravi."

"General."

"I trust your mission went well."

"…Yes. Yes, it did."

♥

The safe house was, it turned out, precisely that: a trim little cottage on the south bank of the Thames, near enough to the City that Tyki could easily imagine a cantankerous old man defining it as 'too close,' whereas he could only consider it 'not close enough by half.' He had chosen to go to ground in London for a profusion of reasons of a fundamentally practical nature: the enormous human population, perfect to hide within and among; the ease with which a relatively remunerative occupation could be procured anywhere cards were played; the unlikelihood of becoming suicidally bored, no matter how disagreeably sedentary his existence might become. Well, perhaps not that: the boredom had gotten fairly awful in less than a month and forced him to start cheating in increasingly baroque ways in order to maintain a proper level of interest in nearly any game. That helped, if only a little, as the risk of being caught and, possibly, horribly murdered in a squalid little Whitechapel alley had a generally beneficial effect on his concentration. The loneliness was far, far worse than the boredom and subsequently much more difficult to manage successfully. After all, even the meanest palliative to it was generally closed to him: he dared not stay too long in any one place, even in the City, and moved frequently from hostel to boarding house to tavern. He'd stayed longest at his little apartment of rooms in Islington, long enough to become known by face and tastes at least to a handful of the locals, which was he supposed something between laziness and recklessness on his part but was mostly a product of solitary folly. Alone was his least favourite mode of existence and he regularly woke in the night, feeling about for Eaze or Rhode or, God help him, even Lero, and suffering pangs of absolute desolation when he woke enough to realize that no one else was there, or would be.

There was simply no help for it, and he resigned himself quietly when the Bookman-in-waiting unlocked that little cottage door for him, to tedium and isolation both. It was set back from the road on a little rise above the river, which was clearly visible from most of the windows and from the little winter-dead rear garden, surrounded in somewhat overgrown boxwood hedges and a high spreading tree or two. There were neighbours, and some of them quite close by, but most of the houses and cottages to either side were closed up yet for the winter and wouldn't see anyone but servants sent to clean and air them for a good six months. This particular dwelling was among the smallest on the road, consisting of a single boxy structure of white-washed stone, its roof of sound grey slate, its door and window-shutters painted an oddly vivid shade of green. Inside were four rooms: a bachelor's bedchamber of one (admittedly very comfortable) bed and chest of drawers; a bath that had obviously had some recent remodelling; a kitchen; and a room that seemed to serve as a combination of other uses, including dining, sitting, and studying, as it held a table and several comfortable chairs and a bookcase full of tomes that had probably been selected for their complete innocuousness. They had arrived by night and his host was gone before first light the next morning; by noon, supplies had arrived sufficient for several weeks, along with a note that he scrutinized and laid aside: it wasn't in a language he could read.

For the best part of that first morning, he sulked about feeling thoroughly sorry for himself – he felt he deserved at least that much of a wallow. More than that, however, and even he wouldn't be able to stand himself and so he began searching for pleasing diversions or, if not diversion, than at least something to be in a better mood about. He found it, weirdly, outside in the garden, which was not the sort of thing he was in any way accustomed to: given his druthers, he rarely stayed in one place long enough to watch anything grow, even when he wasn't being driven by the relative certainty of his own agonizing demise. It was clearly even later in the winter than he'd thought for little green spikes of newly emergent plants were pushing their way up through the damp soil of the kitchen herb-beds, tiny and delicate. Buds were beginning to frost the trees and hedges and he decided, if he had to be in a good mood about anything, he'd take some pleasure in that: he'd never been wronged by a tree, and there were worse things than to sit on the verge between city and country and watch the world come back to life in the springtime. By the middle of the week, he was contemplating systematically burning every green and growing thing for two square miles because, frankly, he knew he was working too damned hard not to do so.

Fortunately, the Bookman-in-waiting made a timely return before he, or tragedy, could strike.

"Hullo," the annoyingly cheerful little bastard announced, as he came in still dripping from the slow, soaking rain that had settled in about noon that day, "Country air agreeing with you?"

"…No." Tyki flipped a card in the elaborate game of Solitaire he'd set up around himself.

"Oh. Well." The Bookman-in-waiting reached into his coat and pulled out a small canvas pouch, which he heaved over. "Go ahead and add to the ambient pollution level if that'd make you feel more to home. I noticed you were almost out of – "

"_Cigarettes._"

"Yes. Go ahead and get it out of your system – Panda smokes like a chimney sometimes, too." Tyki got the distinct feeling he was being laughed at, but couldn't bring himself to care. "I'll make dinner."

The meal, that night, was a particularly fine one of fresh-caught fish baked with lemon and white wine and stuffed with herbs, followed by coffee that was almost as good as Eaze's and a plum tart that had made it to the cottage only slightly squished by the journey. Clearly, Bookman Minor had learned how to make the best of simple things somewhere during the course of his education, and Tyki told him so without reservation.

"You're welcome," the deservedly cheerful bastard replied, as they leaned back together next to the fire, the rain drumming on the roof above them. "I'm sorry I couldn't get back before this. Panda was keeping me busy running errands in the City."

"I've been meaning to ask. Panda?" Tyki inclined a questioning brow and received a chuckle in response.

"My mentor. The Old Man himself. It was the first cheeky thing I ever called him, and it's rather stuck over the years." The Bookman-in-waiting grinned in fond reminiscence. "If you ever hear him call me anything, it'll probably be 'puppy.' Or hooligan."

"Or…?"

"Or what?"

"You have a _name_, don't you?"

"Oh!" He smacked himself lightly on the forehead. "I thought you knew. Ravi. My…"

"Victims?"

"…friends and colleagues call me Ravi." The tip of his tongue darted across his lips. "I suppose it'd be easier than 'you' from here on out, yeah?"

"_Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavi._" Tyki let it roll around inside his mouth a bit. "It suits, I suppose. There's a river in India called – "

"Yes, I know," Ravi, Bookman Minor, resolutely cheerful bastard, sounded mildly aggrieved to have that information imparted to him yet again. "Also a Hindi god. Panda thinks I did that on purpose but…not really."

Tyki felt the corners of his mouth twitching involuntarily. "I'll take your word for it. I suppose I owe the honour of hosting your divine person to our previously defined arrangement?"

"Yes. I'll be leaving for Home tomorrow and I was hoping to have something to take with me. For research purposes, you understand." He bent and dug about in the canvas courier's satchel he'd brought with him, emerging with a black leather bound journal and pen case. "The Archive is vast – I'm fairly sure that, given the volume of _incidental_ information it holds about the House of Noah, specific information from memories could be corroborated by additional evidence, referenced by time."

"What good would that do?"

"It would help in identifying the foundations, the underlying causes of all this, so they can be addressed and repaired." A fresh pot of ink came down on the table. "Can you tell me something…early? The earliest memories you have, I mean. As early as you can tell."

"I would like to be on record as believing you completely insane, and yet unable to think of a better place to start." Tyki licked his lips and closed his eyes, reached back into a place that was much quieter, and much brighter, than it had been before. "Let me…think."

♥

"…He doesn't seem to remember the events surrounding the creation of the first Ark."

"He wouldn't. He wasn't born until well after the original was complete. I suspect you'll find he doesn't really remember the Deluge, either."

"And you would know that how…?"

"Because I remember the hour he first drew breath."

♥

Life fell into a bit of a pattern and, Tyki was forced to admit, the pattern wasn't precisely unpleasant. The Bookman seemed intent on staying close to Home and sent forth his apprentice to run errands, fetch information sources, engage in the sort of scholarly commerce that their lineage favoured more than war; as a consequence, that apprentice often had a considerable degree of liberty in accomplishing his assorted tasks and a good deal of time on his hands once they were done. He visited, as often as he was able, and Tyki was quietly shocked at how much he looked forward to those visits, even if they were more often than not delicate interrogations on crimes and tragedies and terrible circumstances eight thousand years dust. In those hours, at least, he wasn't alone; Ravi, to give him the credit that he deserved, seemed to realize it and lingered longer than was strictly necessary some days, some nights, after he'd finished talking and couldn't make himself remember anything more.

On one of them, Ravi set a cup of tea at his elbow and sat down in the chair nearest his own, a strange, set look on his face. Or perhaps it was a trick of firelight and shadow; he was never quite sure, afterwards. "You miss them."

"Of course." He sipped the tea, peppermint, which was soothing on his talked-sore throat and leant his head back against the cushions of the chair. "Don't you miss your family? You had to give them up to become the Bookman's apprentice, didn't you?"

"I…don't remember them. My parents." Ravi paused, glanced away, looked back and couldn't hold his gaze. "Panda adopted me as his heir when I was very young."

"Ah. Well, for what it's worth, I don't remember mine very well, either. It's strange – how things that happened centuries and millennia ago can seem so sharp and clear, it's like they happened yesterday…and I can't clearly recall my own mother's face." He smiled slightly, humourlessly. "I suppose it'll come back to me eventually. Or maybe the next person unfortunate enough to have _me_ banging around in the back of their head. Between you and me, I'm not so sure I'd wish that on anyone – I've made a bit of a wreck of things."

"Don't say that," Ravi replied, softly. "It's not your fault."

"You're kind to say." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I beg to differ but –"

"It. Is not. Your fault." Ravi's voice was taut with a species of righteous outrage that Tyki rarely heard at all, much less directed in his own defence; it was mildly astounding. "We both know who did this, to you, to your family. Don't you _dare_ take one ounce of blame from where it belongs."

"I somehow get the feeling you're losing your objectivity in that regard," He felt compelled, by native honesty, by some stupid, foolish urge to hold all that righteousness at arm's-length, to reply. "I'm not _innocent_ in all this. I killed. I can't even really say that I regret it that much. I…don't know that I would do it again. But, for them, I did and I couldn't undo it if I wanted to."

"You've killed. So have I. That doesn't mean either of us are monsters." That single earnest eye flicked closed. "I don't want you to think you deserve to be forgotten. You don't deserve that – no one does. I – "

Tyki reached out and laid a pair of fingers across his companion's mouth. "You really _don't_ know when to shut up, do you?"

Ravi's lips parted against his skin. "Never…really learned."

♥

"He…doesn't think he remembers anything else. Nothing coherent enough to cross-reference and date, at any rate – just snippets here and there. He speaks medieval Occitan when he's in certain states of mind. Poetry, I think."

"Likely. Pleasure is his essence, after all – the Languedoc, before de Montfort, was arguably the most pleasant place to be had in Christendom."

"…I…The last concrete date I was able to confirm was Jerusalem, 1099. The First Crusade. God, he remembers _being_ there. He remembers _dying_ there, it was the most terrible thing I ever – "

"Don't forget that he's _also_ always where the blood begins flowing in rivers. That's why I wanted you to get him out of London."

♥

That summer was memorably, miserably hot, at least insofar as Tyki was concerned, and far more barren of company. He supposed it was inevitable: the war, which had seemed to slow a bit over the bitter winter and through the long, wet spring, was alive again and the Bookman's apprentice was one of those expected to fight it. Supplies arrived more frequently than any human visitor; this time, they included newspapers written in Portuguese, for which he was grateful. Second-hand contact with the world was better than no contact at all, he decided, even if the whole situation gave him far too much time to brood on things he couldn't change. Brood and, more disturbingly, dream. Before this, he rarely troubled to remember his dreams; now, the assailants of his sleeping mind bled over into the waking world in ways that almost daily made him question both senses and sanity, relative though it might be. The shambling, crumbling corpse of the girl who was and wasn't his sister occupied the corner of his eye during the day, vanishing whenever he tried to look at her directly, raspy horror of a voice leaving children's rhymes hanging on the air behind her; by night, she sat on the bed next to him as he slept or tried to sleep, fire-blackened flesh crumbling off her scorched bones with every hissing promise that they would be together again soon, soon. One morning, he woke to find Eaze coughing blood and pus and assorted other secretions out of his consumption-damaged lungs in the middle of the kitchen floor; that night, he dreamt of plague-decimated villages and cities where the ill and the hale of whole families were boarded up inside their homes and set to the torch.

After that, it became increasingly difficult to discern the difference between horrid flights of wildly overactive imagination and even more horrific fragments of true memory, dredged from some black and polluted place in his blood, his soul. He dreamt death – his own – every time he closed his eyes, until he almost felt himself a ghost haunting his own body, and resolved that enough was enough and he wouldn't sleep again until fatigue forced him to do so. Serial abuse of all the coffee and tea in the house kept him so tightly and highly strung that sleep fled his company for the best part of four days; on the fifth, absolute exhaustion of mind and body crashed down on him with such force that he never could quite recall how he got to bed thereafter. He woke sprawled at a neck-disobliging angle some time later with a tousled red head lying on his belly, attached to a black-clad body, that upon closer examination turned out to be the eyeless, tongueless corpse of the Bookman-in-waiting, mouth slit across his cheeks and lips carved away into a hideous rictus-grinning parody of another very familiar face.

For the first time, he was glad that no neighbours lived close enough to hear him screaming.

Ravi arrived unannounced late one sticky August night as he sat fighting sleep and shadows in his favourite chair in front of the cold fireplace. He did not, in fact, recall falling asleep, though he must have for he bolted awake at the feather-light touch on his shoulder and struck before he had sense enough to see who it was; strong, callused hands caught at his wrists and kept him from doing something he'd regret in the morning. "You! You're – " He wanted to cry _alive alive alive_ but thought that might come across as a touch alarming, as well as half-mad. "Here. You're here. It's the middle of the night."

"I came to check on you. I was – I haven't had a chance in a while, I thought I'd – " Ravi didn't appear capable of finishing a sentence, which Tyki found strangely mollifying. "Are you all right?"

"I'm – " A part of him wished, very much, to soothe the worry off Ravi's face with a half-truth; a far larger part wanted very much to be soothed instead. "No. I've been sleeping badly."

"The heat? You need summer clothes, don't you? I'm an idiot, I'll – "

"No." Softly. "Nightmares."

Ravi's mouth worked silently for a moment. "Oh. What -- ?"

"Him. Them." He licked his lips, damp with sweat, and closed his eyes. "It's almost over, isn't it? The preliminaries. The prologue. It's all about to begin in earnest and the only thing left to do is lay the last of the sacrifices on the altar." He laughed hollowly. "At least I might see one of them again before the end. Maybe. He could always come for me himself."

"_Don't say that._" Low and fierce. "I promised you – I promised you I'd – "

"Keep me safe? Hide me from them? From him? Idiot. You can't. You never could. He knows me, bone and blood, he always has. Just like you know my mind, my soul." He leaned forward and rested his forehead against Ravi's chest, felt his heart pounding hard enough to make his ribs ache through that contact. "Ravi. Please."

"I – "

"Please." He whispered. "I…don't want to regret…everything about these last days. I don't want to die not knowing you the way…you know me. Please. Just…tonight. You don't have to come back."

"Oh. Oh, _God._"

It was sweeter, far, far sweeter than even his wildest imaginings had led him to think it might be, and far more intense, as well. He never expected to sink in and drown, pulled down by hot-hungry kisses and the caress of knowing, gentle hands, slender hips and strong legs and a body that yielded its secrets to him willingly. The Bookman's apprentice was not a stranger to this. He was not an innocent to be broken by it. He knew his own pleasure, he knew his own unsecret, unhidden desires, and he knew how to offer them, how to accept the pleasure and the desire and the hungers offered to him in return. It was, for that night, in that bed, pinioned whimpering and mewling beneath him, rocking astride him back arched and head thrown back, spilling hot offerings again and again across his belly, crying his name in desperate anguish and ecstatic release, perfect.

Perfect, once, one last time.

He found that he couldn't even regret it, the next morning, when he woke alone.

♥

"Please. We can't do this. It's obscene. He _knows_ – he's _always_ known – he's just sitting there, waiting to die, he – "

"There's nothing more to be down now, Bookman. You know that as well as I do. The final act has been set in motion – there's nothing left for him to do but play this last part. If you're right about him, he'll even let it happen."

"That's all this ever was to you. A lure. Blood on the altar, to draw _him._"

"A sacrifice. Yes. Better one than millions, especially one that the Millennium will come for himself. Think. You know I'm right."

♥

It wasn't summer, and it wasn't quite yet autumn. The air tasted faintly of smoke, rich and hazy, and the trees were starting to turn; already, a scattering of yellow leaves covered the back garden. It was altogether pleasant to sit there and bask in the late afternoon sunshine, letting the heat melt into his bones; he would be cold forever soon enough, inherited memories etched into someone else's blood, words on a page in a book that, after awhile, no one would want to read. He hoped, quietly, that Ravi had gotten some sidelong use out of the whole thing after all: that, at some point in a future he couldn't imagine, the war would actually end, that the children of Noah would be reconciled to the children of everyone else, that all the old wrongs would be righted and all the old wounds healed. He doubted it, but he hoped nonetheless, if only for the sake of that particular sweet idiot and the boy who hadn't wanted to kill him.

A shadow fell over him, colder than the day should have allowed and smelling of blood and tears that should have dried a very long time before. "Tyki-pon. It's good to see you again. To think you've been here this whole time. And you've even prepared the altar – how thoughtful! _**I never should have doubted you! **_♥"

Tyki let his eyes fall closed.



He might have been asleep – it looked, for all the world, as though he had gone out back and settled down and drifted off in the early autumn sunshine. Artfully disarrayed black curls fell across his forehead, just so; immaculate white sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, one arm across his lap, a single playing-card still held between deft, slender fingers; head leant back against the white-washed garden wall as though he might rouse at any moment and complain about the pain in his neck; there was, altogether, surprisingly little blood and what there was had been put to good use. Ravi knelt, unmoving, at his side, one cold hand cradled in his own, and fought the urge to howl. Instead, he forced himself to ask, quietly and evenly, "What does it say?"

"It says," General Cross replied, in precisely the same tone, "Queen to Knight, King's Four: check."

"I hope," Ravi said from between clenched teeth, "that only one of you ever comes to know precisely how much I hate you both at this moment."

A snort. "Boy, feel free to hate me as much as you like. This was a bloody exercise in futility and, regardless of what my idiot apprentice might think, I hate wasting moves more than money. We'll never have a chance like this again."

"An exercise – " He stopped, swallowed, relaxed his grip. "Every word I said to him was a lie. I gave my word, and you never intended to even try keeping it. He _believed me_ and you – "

"As I said, hate me all you like. Allen learned the practical benefits years ago, and it's time the rest of you did, as well." Softly. "Let's go. There's nothing left to do for him – he made his own choices, as well, Bookman. Remember that."

"I somehow doubt that will be a problem."


	7. Chapter 7

_**Belated**_

The Bookman and his apprentice left Home in the small hours of the morning on June 21st, when dawn was a hint of pale crimson on the eastern horizon and all but a bare handful of the motherhouse's residents were still abed. Rinali encountered them on their way out, as she pushed a cart loaded with coffee cups and platters of fresh pastry for the morning shift coming on duty in the Science Department at dawn; Ravi grinned at her, snitched a fruit-stuffed tart, and, she realized somewhat later, left something as well: an artfully folded note, sealed in green wax that had been painstakingly inscribed by hand with a sewing needle rather than stamped. This she tucked in the pocket of her uniform blouse and, an hour and a quarter later, she slipped it under the door to Kanda's quarters with a small pang in her heart. Kanda had been, for him, in an excessively good temper recently; she truly pitied anyone he encountered first thing that day.



She was somewhat surprised when, later that day, Kanda sat down across from her at the commissary table where she was eating her lunch; in fact, for an instant, all she could do was stare stupidly at the Kanda-shaped obstruction where her admittedly unthrilling view of the wall had been. It seemed, for that matter, as though he himself had no idea what to do or say, either, and for a long moment, they stared wordlessly at one another as the completely unprecedented sight of _Kanda Yuu actually sitting down to dine with another living being _reverberated around the crowded room like the sound of an unexpected gunshot, leaving shocked silence in its wake. Finally, he muttered in a voice just loud enough to be audible, "May I join you?" thus allowing her to nod her post-facto permission and let the rest of the room to go back to what it was doing with the natural balance of the universe still somewhat askew but at least moving again.

For several more minutes thereafter they sat together in silence, eating. Rinali sampled Jerry's exquisite ratatouille while Kanda looked simultaneously desperately grateful to the laws of physics that dictated the impossibility of consuming soba and talking with one's mouth full and wildly annoyed because he just as desperately wanted to say _something._

"RinaliIneedyourhelp."

It came out so quickly and softly that Rinali initially didn't credit her own ears. "Sorry?"

"I," Still at a level of audibility barely above the background sound of dozens of people chattering, but much more slowly, "need your help."

Rinali tilted her head slightly to glare a fusillade of daggers at the half-dozen Signals Department staff members sitting down the table and obviously attempting to accidentally overhear their conversation, and lowered her own voice accordingly. "What with?"

Kanda shoved in another mouthful of soba and chewed as furiously as his excellent table-manners allowed, visibly thinking of how to phrase his request. "Ravi. His birthday." A pause, as Rinali blinked in surprise. "I need a present." Another pause; Kanda set down his chopsticks and made a gesture with both hands, a motion that encompassed his every inarticulate feeling quite admirably. "A _nice_ present."

Rinali blinked again, throttled her instinctual impulse to invoke the Boots and kick the Kanda-shaped object sitting across from her through the wall whilst screaming for Jerry to warn her brother that the Earl had finally figured out how to breach their security, and tried to think of a truly diplomatic way to phrase what she needed to say. "…Do you have any idea what he might…like?"

"…No." It was, quite possibly, the most heart-touchingly miserable whisper she'd ever heard passing Kanda's lips.

Rinali's not-precisely-hard heart was moved. "I'll see what I can find."



Finding out more, as it turned out, was considerably more difficult than Rinali had imagined sitting in the dining hall with Kanda. Being the sister of the Chief of Operations had certain advantages attached to it but, in this case, they weren't amounting to very much. Ravi's personnel file had been assiduously shorn of any incriminating – or even any basically identifying – personal details: even his real name had been redacted, and those of his parents had been replaced with the internal reference codes for an Exorcist and a non-Finder ally, both deceased, any records pertaining to any of them residing in the keeping of the Order's resident archivist, an ancient gorgon completely immune to charm and disinclined to allow access to her domain with a direct order from the Chief of Operations. For a multitude of reasons, she was reluctant to seek such permission, if only because her brother, when in a state of insufficient sleep and more than sufficient caffeination, tended to run on at the mouth in a manner that would have her errand spread across Home before the day was out. Instead, she decided on a lateral tactic and when next the housekeeping staff went down into the lower depths of the library to tend the quarters of the Bookmen in their absence, she tagged along; she was not, after all, above changing a bit of linen for the purposes of espionage.

Ravi's private quarters were not quite what she had imagined them to be. Granted, her personal experiences with the quarters of the predominantly teenaged, predominantly male members of the Black Order were strictly limited by no one's desire to become a human test subject in her brother's latest cybernetics experiments, but she had still managed to form certain impressions, which consisted mostly of a tendency toward barely organized clutter, pictures torn from the pages of a certain class of London-originating periodicals pinned to any wooden surface, and a scent mostly redolent of socks that hadn't been sent to the laundry quite possibly in the living memory of the order. Ravi's quarters fit that impression in only one particular: his small room was, in fact, rather cluttered but the clutter was _clearly and deliberately organized_ in a manner that maximized efficiency of access from the desk as well as by topic; most of it was books and stacks of paper held together with little twists of silver wire or linen ties and an assortment of blank reams and other unused writing supplies. He was, Rinali noted, extremely hard on his pens: his desk contained an entire drawer of nothing but damaged nibs and fountain pens with broken drawing mechanisms and calligraphy brushes whose bristles had seen better days by far. He kept his inkwells properly closed when they weren't in use and an assortment of carved soapstone seals and cast brass stamps, along with the wax and the cinnabar paste on which to use them, ready to hand: each one contained some reference to the numerals 4 and 9. The corners did not smell of unwashed socks but the beeswax candles he tended to favour, for which she was very grateful, his clothespress contained spare uniforms and a curious garment that seemed half-cloak and half-rain-wear; he must have his civilian clothing with him in the event that he needed to blend into the local population more thoroughly. His bed was neatly made and still smelt faintly of the closet-herbs the housekeeping staff used to keep the linen fresh between uses; she wondered where he slept, if it wasn't here.

There was, she realized, precisely nothing of a personal nature immediately visible. No pictures on the walls, no letters in the correspondence drawer on the desk, no hint beyond the subjects of the books he was reading as to any personal interests he might possess. And the books were, predictably, all historical documents.

Annoyed, she tapped her foot and, in the sound that followed, she thought she heard an echo. A quarter hour of careful experimentation later, and she found the cause: a small section of the floor in the far corner had been carefully taken up and an equally tiny space beneath it had been hollowed out to form a storage area that fit below the level of the floor and above the cut gray stone immediately below it. Inside that space was a carved wooden box, rich red wood carefully lacquered, no more than six inches to a side and a two inches deep. It was not locked, and inside she found a handful of curious objects: a scratched-dull black horn button still sewn to a threadbare swatch of brown velveteen; a woman's cameo brooch, exquisitely carved white-and-pink shell set in a delicate golden filigree, its pin bent beyond repair; a torn daguerreotype, its edges crumbling from age and much handling, of a lovely smiling woman's face and left shoulder, her hair bound up in a Greek fashion not unlike the cameo's own. Carefully, she replaced them all exactly as they had been when she opened the box, replaced the box, and set the bit of flooring back in place.

♥

"A rabbit."

"A toy rabbit, of course."

"Yes, a toy. He…had it with him when he first came here, and he wouldn't let anyone take it from him, even though the thing was so old and ratty it was falling apart. Someone finally took it off his bed in the end and got rid of it while he wasn't around to object." A long pause. "I thought he'd cry about it, and that I'd have to hit him, but he never did. I…"

"Yes?"

"I think it was…hers. His mother's. He never talked about her very much but I know he remembered her."

"I expect everything in the box was hers, then. She was quite lovely."

"…."

"Kanda?"

"Yes?"

"Did anyone ever teach you how to sew?"

♥

The Bookman and his apprentice returned Home in the small hours of the morning on the twelfth of August, when the brightest stars were still hanging in the sky and even Rinali, redoubtable though she was, was still snug in her bed dreaming of a boy she had just met. No one encountered them as they made their way down into the depths of the library where their quarters lay, the old man straight and unbowed, the younger man moving with the deliberation of someone who knows his bed is close and that no one will argue with him filling it. They parted in the common study between their individual rooms with murmured pleasantries and each went to his rest.

The Bookman found, sitting upon his bed, a simple rosewood box in which lay an exquisitely carved ivory pen in the shape of a quill, its nib a surgical steel product of one of Komui's several side researches etched with the interlocking numerals 4 and 8. The note included indicated that it was the newest product of the Order's science, ridiculously efficient in its use of ink, and wishing him a very happy birthday. He recognized his apprentice's sentiment, his handwriting, and his eye for functional aesthetics, and decided that a reprimand, should one be necessary, could wait until the morning, if ever.

The Bookman's apprentice found, sitting upon his bed, a rabbit constructed entirely of brown velveteen, its eyes polished buttons of black horn, its nose a somewhat misshapen mess of pink thread that he assumed was an attempt at actual embroidery. There was no note, and there was no need for one: around the rabbit's neck was a collar of braided black hair, tied with a scarlet ribbon.


	8. Chapter 8

_**Apologies**_

_****_

It began between them, as things usually did, with an argument. Afterwards, Allen was never quite sure what that argument was about, how it had started, or why -- which was, in fact, also fairly typical of the majority of his interactions with Kanda Yuu on any given day, time of year, or phase of the moon. In fact, he was developing a theory concerning the precise gradients in Kanda's generally disagreeable temperament, the phases of the moon, the relative dew-point temperature on the particular day of observation, and an insanely complex advanced mathematical theorem that Komui had showed him that made predicting what species of foul temper the rotten bastard would wake up in a matter of remembering to carry over and place the decimal points correctly. The theory, at the moment, boiled down to the base idea that Komui had driven Kanda round the bend some time before Allen had even come to the Black Order and now he was simply going to have to endure the results, because the damage to the older boy's psyche was clearly beyond the repair of mortal men and probably even God.

It didn't help that Rinali basically agreed with Allen's assessment of the situation and that Ravi, also a rotten bastard, couldn't stop grinning at him about it.

"I'm afraid that my brother has always had a...bit of an unhealthy interest in Yuu," Rinali admitted over breakfast, _sotto voce_ and directly against Allen's ear, so neither the deranged brother in question nor the annoying, rotten, pigheaded bastard they were actually discussing could overhear; Asia Branch's commissary echoed horribly. "He's a hopeless romantic, you know, and between the flower and the tattoo and the coming back to life and the unspoken air of promises made but not yet kept...Well, catnip. It was just like catnip. I'm afraid he did a number of experiments before and after he became Chief of Operations -- if Yuu didn't have the respect for chain of command that he does, I'm afraid Komui would have been found dead in a ditch with fifteen thousand stab wounds in his back long before now. He'd have deserved it, too."

Ravi, seated across from them, was trying with all his might not to laugh too obviously _and_ avoid choking to death on his morning bowl of cold noodles and succeeding at only one. Allen, who normally liked Ravi well enough, found himself having to resist the urge to reach across the table and do something he'd regret a few minutes later. "Well, Allen, it's been my experience when apologizing to Yuu -- "

"_Apologizing?!_" Allen yelped, the echoes of this expulsion resounding around the commissary roof like the remnants of a very small clap of thunder; he waited until they had died away to continue in the fiercest whisper he could manage. "Why the Hell should _I_ apologize to that...that...pigheaded -- rotten -- "

"Listen, Allen," Ravi cut him off in a tone of supreme earnestness. "I know the injustice of it rankles you to the core, but the fact of the matter is, there is _absolutely no pragmatic way_ of proving that you're not at fault when it comes to an argument with Kanda Yuu. _None._ Trust me on this. If you want to shove his nose back in joint and move on, it's better to assume that you did something to piss him off and apologize. Otherwise, he'll be stalking around like an offended cat for _days_, being even more disagreeable than usual, and nobody wants to put up with that. Including you. Right?"

"...Right," Allen admitted, grudgingly, after his glare had precisely no effect on Ravi's absolute certainty.

"Well, then, here's what you do..."

Kanda's quarters lay two floors down and six doors over from Allen's own, on a broad stretch of hall containing the entryways to numerous suites of rooms allocated to the motherhouse's refugees and the sort of architectural embellishments that facilitated assorted Exorcists and support staff sneaking about at all hours. Allen lurked in one -- a particularly deep alcove occupied by an enormous urn large enough to contain his entire person -- and waited until he was absolutely certain Kanda had returned from his evening calisthenics regimen. He was certain because he happened to be peeking from beneath the lid of the urn as the object of his wrath/affection walked past a foot and half way, curtain of jet hair still glistening with water from the bath he'd taken, wafting the scent of whatever soap he'd acquired the distance between them effortlessly and Allen's head had spun and his mouth had watered and he forced himself to admit that he was, in fact, doing the right thing. Being the bigger person. Making things right. He promised himself a generous handful of that hair once Kanda was in a better mood.

He waited until the echoes of the door closing had died away and wriggled, as quietly as possible, out of the urn and slithered, also as quietly as possible, down the hall. The note he clutched was written on the finest mulberry paper to be had, tied shut with thin scarlet silk ribbons, and went under the door without even the smallest sound. Its contents were, according to Ravi, not the most eloquent thing in the canons of Western literature but more than sufficient as far as apologies went. He waited until he heard Kanda moving toward the door and fled, humming cheerfully to himself under his breath. Ravi really was right -- it was just as good to do the apologizing, in the end.

Allen woke the next morning in a state of excessively good cheer, the sort of good cheer that he found only resulted from doing the right thing with the anticipation of eventual reward -- as opposed to doing the right thing and eventually being saddled with a bill for services rendered containing more zeroes than the entire per annum budget of the Empire. Somewhere, he felt, the sun was shining and birds were singing and they were doing so for him; he bounced out of bed with what Kanda would certainly have felt was an exceptionally irritating amount of vim, were he present to witness it, performed his morning toilette, and opened his door to go down to breakfast --

A small square of mulberry paper was stuck to his door with a straight pin. It looked suspiciously familiar.

Good mood wavering like a kite caught in a high wind, he extracted the pin and pulled open the scarlet silk ties. His heart sank. Inside, neatly lined out was his own peace offering:

My dearest love 

I made an awful mistake. 

But I'm really cute! 

Written beneath, in what had to be Kanda's neatest handwriting, was his reply:

Your mistake was bad  
I can never forgive you  
I hate you, you suck. 

Reaching up to smooth down his violently twitching left eyebrow, Allen closed the door and began composing his reply.

"This is _entirely_ your fault," Allen informed Ravi through clenched teeth as they sat down to dinner that night. "If I'd followed through on my initial impulse, none of this would have happened."

Ravi froze with a tea-bowl halfway to his mouth. "Dare I ask what 'this' is?"

"He replied to my poem, Ravi." Allen savagely sucked a mango ball off its bamboo skewer. "The bastard. I should have just punched him in the head. Or stabbed him. Stabbing's always good -- "

"Oh, dear."

"I hate writing poetry, Ravi. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaate it. But I couldn't _not_ reply. I swear, next time -- "

"Stabbing him won't really help, you know. He's not possessed by evil any more than I was and I'm convinced that nothing pisses him off more than wrecking his uniform shirts -- there are thousands of dead akuma that can attest to that fact."

"Don't. Care." Allen replied around a mouthful of marzipan fancifully sculpted in the shape of a dragon-horse. "All. Your. Fault."

Ravi's mouth, opened to argue further, snapped shut and his single green eye widened. The small hairs on the back of Allen's neck stood up and saluted as a long, long-haired, shadow fell over them both. "Moyashi. Idiot." A small, neatly folded square of mulberry paper flew over his head and landed neatly in the middle of a plate of _mitarashi dango_ and Kanda's shadow departed again, moving away in his usual businesslike stride.

For a long moment, neither he nor Ravi moved -- well, rather, neither moved _voluntarily._ He couldn't precisely control the twitching of his left eye. Ravi's gaze flicked back and forth from him, to the note marring his plate, and back to him before, with a single quick motion, the Bookman-in-waiting picked it up and opened it. Not for the first time, Allen wished he'd had whatever training Ravi'd been given when it came to controlling his expression under the most trying of circumstances; it would have come in handy at the poker table. Even so, the corners of his mouth spasmed for several seconds before, with great calm, he handed the note across the table and announced, in an oddly strangled tone of voice, "I have to go."

Then he fled as fast as his legs could carry him.

Allen shook his fist at Ravi's departing back and turned his attention to the note. Again, his contribution had been neatly lined out:

Fine be that way, bitch. 

I'll never let you near me 

Or touch you again. 

And, beneath it, Kanda had scrawled something in the sort of penmanship that made him suspect that Mugen had been occupying his other hand the entire time.

Don't call me that, idiot  
I'll be any way I like  
So right there, fuck face. 

"Oh, that is _it._"

This time, Allen didn't slip his reply under the door. There was no skulking or attempts at subtlety. Instead, he marched up and knocked. When Kanda answered, habitual scowl plastered on his face, Allen introduced that expression to the knuckles of his non-weaponized right hand, which happened to have a small square of mulberry paper clenched in it. Some hours later, after the last of the insults had been hurled, the last of the punches thrown, the last pieces of clothing torn off and tossed away, the last moans and cries rung away to silence, and they lay tangled together in the wreckage of Kanda's bed, the bastard finally stirred and lifted his head. "Just so you know, Moyashi..."

"...Allen..."

"..._whatever_...Just so you know, I took up painting because I much prefer it to writing poetry. I _suck_ at poetry."

"...I'll keep that in mind." 


	9. Chapter 9

_**Without You**_

_He'd seen the boy about before, of course – it was impossible not to, seeing how he was the only child living in the small boarding-house they were all presently calling home. Mostly he could be found playing by himself in the tiny side yard, stretched out on his belly with a ball of string and the household cats, with whom he appeared to be close personal friends, or in the herb-and-vegetable plot out back with the landlady, helping her pull weeds and bind up bunches of greenery for drying and carry her basket and tools to and fro. He seemed, to Tyki's eye, to never smile quite as much as a boy his age ought to, or to laugh, or to simply run about for no good reason and get himself underfoot. It became his habit, therefore, to bring the boy home some small treat on occasion: a perfect apple, big as a big man's fist and red as sin, unbruised and unblemished; a tiny ball of hard rubber small enough to fit in the palm of the boy's hand; a tart or bun fresh and still warm from the baker's oven. The boy accepted these presents with a gravitas all out of proportion to his age – he couldn't have been more than four or five – and a very proper 'thank you, sir' and sometimes a reward in the __form of a quick, bright smile that lit up his whole face._

_The boy's mother was another story entirely. Tyki saw considerably more of her, as she worked all over the little mining town at an assortment of jobs in a variety of locales. He got the feeling, from her steely-eyed glare, that she didn't much like him and might well suspect that he possessed some dishonourable intentions towards her son. This couldn't be further from the truth, as he was deeply engaged in pretending toward general honourability just now and was thoroughly loath to louse it up, not to mention the fact that he generally didn't favour the charms of small children, except when it came to making them smile. He suspected that attempting to explain such gradations of his character, however, would be utterly lost on her and so attempted to avoid encountering her son where she could see, thus preventing any further agitations of her spirit. A touch of charm plied upon their landlady convinced that worthy Christian widow-woman's tongue to loosen in regards to the woman, whose name was Gwynne, and her son, who was named Rhys, after the father entombed with a half-dozen other men at the bottom of a collapsed mine-shaft. That explained much: the woman had the look about her of someone who had been very happy once, and hadn't been for quite some time, and now could not imagine ever being truly happy ever again. Tyki suspected she had even been pretty once: fair of hair and eyes, plump and prone to smiling; now her mouth was set in the sort of firm, hard line that never relaxed into something softer even when she looked on the son she'd borne, the flesh had melted off her bones and the colour had been clawed from her hair and the lovely youth had been beaten out of her by the hard and long and unceasing working hours and the need to stretch the meagre reward she earned for all that work to provide the food and shelter and comfort for two. She was, the landlady averred, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, far too proud to accept anyone's charity and so she set the boy to running errands to pretend the work he did about the house and for her was worth the lesser rent the woman paid._

_She'd a bad cough, the woman did – a cough that wracked her whole skinny-not-slender body and, from time to time, left her handkerchief spotted with blood. It would be the death of her one day, the landlady knew it, and then that sweet little boy of hers would be sent off to live in one of those terrible orphan's asylums with the children of debtors and dead whores. And what would become of him then?_

Rhode Kamelot knew, in her heart of hearts, that it was utterly and absolutely beneath her dignity as a daughter of the House of Noah to be as tooth-grindingly jealous of a little human boy as she was. He wasn't anyone special: one of thousands of orphans from all over Europe and America left alone in the world after accident and illness took his parents, probably sickly himself, who wouldn't even live to be an orphan grown-up if the Earl had his way. She was, however, honest enough with herself on general principles to admit that her jealousy did not arise out of some sort of misguided desire to be _normal_, to be just a girl in crinolines and button-boots on some street somewhere with a Mother on one side and a Father on the other and no cares in her empty little head beyond which flavour of candy to choose from the corner store and how to charm the boy she'd marry before the end of her coming-out party.

No, Rhode could admit that the little gnawing black worm in her heart arose from the fact that that sickly little orphan boy had something that she wanted solely and utterly for her own. He belonged to Tyki, and some part of Tyki belonged to him, and that was what she simply _could not stand._ He had Tyki _all the time_ and it _just wasn't fair_; she only got to have him when the Earl needed him for something _first_ and he was busy and distracted and never really just _himself_.

Down the hall, behind a door and between walls specially constructed just for the purposes of containing him, Tyki-who-wasn't-Tyki _howled_ loudly enough for his voice to overcome the dampening effects of that containment, ranted something in a language that had been dead since before Babel.

Rhode shivered uncontrollably. The Earl said that this was _normal_, that the second awakening was sometimes like this, painful and frenzied, and that when he woke up from it, all would be well again. She wasn't so sure. She _knew_ some of those words herself. For the first two days after the Arks had been separated and the Earl had returned with Tyki-who-wasn't-Tyki slung triumphantly over his shoulder, she had gone every morning to the door he was locked up behind and talked to him through it, trying to reach him, to get some sense out of him, to comfort him, to do something, anything for him, to quiet the terrible pain he was in. In return, the wholly Black thing he had become whispered things back at her, terrible things that she hadn't now or ever wanted to hear, things that drove her away and woke her screaming with nightmares until Lulubelle had finally come and lay down with her to keep the dreams away.

Now, on the third day, she brooded over her breakfast and what she knew she needed to do and, at the same time, desperately didn't _want_ to do. She couldn't reach him. The _Earl_ couldn't reach him. Lulu wouldn't try unless directly ordered to do so, and she was busy with something else anyway. The rest of the family was still buzzing around the world on errands and wouldn't be back for _days_, at least, and by then it might be too late.

Against her better judgment, Rhode opened a door.

Russia was, in her opinion, an unbelievably nasty place anywhere that it wasn't tastelessly opulent – not that she minded tasteless opulence, in fact she tended toward it when she had her druthers – and this place was _particularly_ nasty: a dirty, dusty mining town plunked down in a dirty, dusty valley next to a series of _exceedingly_ dirty and dusty mountains that hadn't been properly covered in trees in ages and seemed proud of the fact that everything, including, it seemed, the people was layered in a combination of coal dust and soot from the constantly-running railway. Lero, whom she'd absconded prior to departure, squawked loudly as she put him to one of his actual functional purposes, namely opening him and making him keep the constant rain of soot from settling on her hair or clothes. At this hour, the mining camp itself was all-but empty, with every able-bodied who wasn't a cook or a drover man down the shafts digging coal out of the mountains, so there was no one about to prevent her from walking up the camp's sole able-bodied boy and poking him sharply in the shoulder where he sat darning socks that were more hole than fabric on a camp cot.

Surprised, the boy squeaked and pulled his mask up, but before he did, Rhode caught a glimpse of his face: fine-featured, a tiny up-turned nose, a bright smile that lit up his whole face. She wanted, unworthily, to say something nasty to quench that smile, but couldn't quite think of anything: that smile _did something_ to her insides that made her realize, at once, that being mean to it was just...mean. For some reason, _that_ made her feel almost sad rather than angry. And now he was staring at her over the top of his mask as though she were witch or a goddess or a princess or something out of one of those weird Russian fairy tale. "Are you Rhys – I mean, Eaze?"

He nodded wordlessly, blue eyes the size of saucers.

"And you know a man named Tyki Mick?"

Another nod and then, very softly, very shyly, "Yes. But he hasn't been here for a very long time."

Rhode's jealousy rose up inside her and roared like a dying dragon. "You miss him, don't you?"

"Yes." Then, a little indignantly, "He _said_ he would come back!"

"He wants to." Rhode admitted, jealousy wrestling with honesty and losing. "He wants to come but he's...he's _lost_ and I can't find him. I need your help. Will you help me?"

The boy's legs were annoyingly short: he had to take four steps for every two of hers and every instant Rhode expected some other member of the family to round a corner and discover her dragging a grubby human boy through the halls of the Holy Ark, or the Earl to call for Lero, who was squawking in incoherent distress about the same. For the boy's part, his head was swivelling around trying to see everything at once and she had to keep tugging on his arm to keep him going in the right direction, trying not to weep with frustration and no small portion of fear. She couldn't even _imagine_ the sort of punishment she'd incur for bringing a human into the Ark, but she rather doubted that it would end at being sent to bed without supper.

The hall leading to Tyki's room was empty its length, but she and the boy still darted from shadowed alcove to shadowed alcove just in case some stupid maintenance mechanical should happen by and try to give the boy a bath. The door of Tyki's door was so cold that it was actually smoking gently, colder than the ambient air temperature of the Ark by dozens of degrees; shadowy tendrils flickered around the gap at the bottom, but couldn't make their way past whatever means the Earl used to keep Tyki-who-wasn't-Tyki bottled up.

"Ready?" Rhode asked breathlessly, her hand on the doorknob.

The boy nodded, the set of his jaw beneath his mask determined, blue eyes the colour of steel. Rhode turned the doorknob and flung open the door.

Inside, the darkness writhed like a living thing, which it was, and Rhode grabbed the boy by the sleeve of his shirt and flung him inside, slamming the door behind him before that hungry darkness could realize its prison had been breached, however so briefly. Then she sat herself down and put her back against the door and listened, expecting screams.

_It happened one day while he was in the mines, and by the time he got back to the boarding-house, most of the excitement was over. The woman hadn't turned up for the first of__ her several jobs and the mistress of the rich man's house where she worked sent a servant around to complain; the landlady had opened the door and found the woman lying cold in her bed, blood still on her lips, bedclothes disordered from the last coughing spasms that she had suffered. The local priest had been summoned to take charge of the corpse and lay it in a pauper's grave before the day was out._

_No one could find the boy._

_He'd made sympathetic noises to the landlady, who was utterly distraught as no one had ever died beneath her roof before, finished the decided inferior dinner that she served that night, and had gone back out for an evening constitutional that, by providence, took him past every hidey-hole that he knew the boy favoured. He found the boy hiding under an enormous boxwood hedge, grubby and tear-stained, and it took quite a bit of time and effort to coax him out, too, since he was quite convinced that he was going to be sent away to an orphan's asylum despite Tyki's protestations to the contrary. He personally knew enough about the contents of such places to disfavour sending anyone there who hadn't done more than lose their parents to deserve it. Finally, the boy believed him and crawled out from under the prickly hedge and buried his face in Tyki's shoulder and sobbed as only a very small child who watched his mother die a terrible death could. Tyki held the boy's head in place as he darted through the back rooms of shops and the walls of the boarding-house and up through the levellers of the stairs and into his room where the others awaited his return._

_There was some initial resistance to packing up and moving out that night – the money was ridiculously good at the moment, for example, and the local women cheaper and less likely to be diseased than the ones to be found elsewhere – but Tyki eventually prevailed in convincing them that leaving now and taking the boy with them was the correct course of action. He crept down the hall that evening to retrieve the boy's few belongings and that night they caught the late train to Cardiff, their little threesome of sticky-fingered orphans now a four-man operation. Even Tyki, who had insisted on it so forcefully, couldn't say exactly why he wanted it to be so – but he had, and now it was, and it felt right, so he also didn't put it to any questions. The boy slept with his head on Tyki's leg all the way south._

Rhode waited, with waxing and waning degrees of patience, for screams but none ever arrived. About midday, she got up, squeaked in annoyance over the pins and needles in her sleeping feet for several minutes, and then took herself and Lero down to the dining room, where the household mechanicals had laid out a lunch buffet on the sideboard. She swore Lero to silence on the matter and so managed to dine without anyone else finding out about her unauthorized activities, then released him to go back to the Earl, and returned to her place in front of the door. It seemed to her, upon arriving, that said portal was, while still cold, not quite so cold as it had been before and as the day passed it grew warmer and warmer by slow degrees beneath her back. She hoped, in a transport of self-directed irritation, that she hadn't missed all the screaming because she'd been too hungry to go without lunch.

The grandfather clock in the Great Hall was chiming half-past-six when someone knocked on the inside of the door and a soft voice whispered, "Girl? Are you there?"

For an instant, Rhode was too shocked to do much of anything. Then, slowly, she got herself to her knees and from there to her feet, and opened the door.

The boy stood there, demonstrably not in pieces, his mask down around his neck, looking weary but inexpressibly triumphant. The writhing, living darkness that had filled the room from floor to ceiling, that had etched things into those floors and ceilings in languages that hadn't been found in human throats in more thousands of years than most people could imagine, was gone. Well, not _gone_ precisely – _embodied_ was a more accurate term, in the form of the man laying on the single intact piece of furniture, a long, low sofa, mostly covered in a blanket. Rhode stepped inside, too stunned to even be jealous, and found Tyki more asleep than awake, golden eyes at half-mast, a vision of dusky unmarked skin and a mess of hair he hadn't had before.

"See? I found him."

Rhode turned and looked at the boy, still too stunned for words, and nodded.

"Rhode." Tyki's voice was rough, raspy, huskier than it had ever been before, and it sounded as though he were working quite hard to remember how to frame what he wanted to say in comprehensible human speech. "You shouldn't have brought him here...but I'm glad that you did."

She nodded and her eyes, inexplicably, filled with tears.

"Eaze. In a moment I'm going to have Rhode take you home...but I have something for you here." The boy stepped close and something passed between them, a tiny object that glinted silver in the dim light making it past the drapes covering the room's sole window. "I'm...going to go back to sleep now for a while. But when I wake up again, I'll come to see you. I promise. Rhode..."

"I'll...I'll take him right home. I promise. Tyki...are you...?" Rhode couldn't quite put the question she wanted to ask him to words, not in front of this little human boy, but it didn't appear that she needed to do so.

Tyki shook his head slightly and laid it back down. "Go on. Hurry – I won't...go again...but I'm...not so sure I'm _back_ yet, either."

Rhode nodded and took the boy's hand. She felt, between their palms, the ridges and contours, the shape of a silver button torn off an Exorcist's uniform coat. A promise of a sort, and for a change, she didn't begrudge that boy its existence one little bit.


	10. Chapter 10

_**The Resolution of **__**a Delusional Hair Fetish**_

_A Noah Clan Domestic Melodrama_

Every morning of the week at precisely seven o'clock, Rhode Kamelot departed her house, bundled into the back of the barouche with her groaning sack of school-books and, most frequently, her father in attendance, the one to be delivered to her ridiculously expensive and exclusive day-school for Young Ladies of Quality, the other to the hideous Gothic monstrosity of a building that housed the ministerial office where he whiled away the days, plotting the destruction of the human race and making certain, in the meantime, that everyone's taxes were paid and the trains ran on time. By no later than nine o'clock, the barouche had returned to the coach-house, unless the weather was particularly inclement, in which case it could take as long as ten. Thereafter, unless there were errands to be run in the city that required someone to be sent out a considerable distance, or Duke Millennium was in the city and required to be carried somewhere, the coach was not used until it was time for Lady Kamelot to make her morning calls – an infrequent occurrence, given that lady's general constitutional weakness and propensity for ill-health – or until the Young Mistress and the Minister were to be brought home again, much later in the afternoon.

Joszef, the coachman, was therefore somewhat surprised to be stopped at the manor's gate one cool, somewhat rainy morning upon returning home by no less a person than the Minister's younger brother. It was, altogether, highly irregular, though life in the house had been thoroughly irregular since the Duke and his young protégé had arrived the month prior to begin with, and he was unsettled enough that he acquiesced to the request made of him with only a token argument; the Lady never left home on rainy days if she could avoid it, anyway. And then he acquiesced to several more – five in total, as a matter of fact – and by the time he was disgustedly ordered to take the Minister's sibling back to the house, it was nearly time to go retrieve him and the Young Mistress anyway. Later that night, taking his dinner in the apartment of rooms in which he dwelt above the carriage house, he chanced to overhear a conversation between the Minister and his brother, as they made their way back to the house from their evening constitutional around the garden.

"Your daughter, Cyril."

"Why is it that she's always 'my daughter' when she's done something wicked? – It is something wicked, isn't it? Or else you'd not have dragged me out here to talk about it – "

"...Cyril."

"All right, all right. What is it?"

"Exactly how much allowance are you giving that girl?"

"Oh! As to that, well – "

"..._Cyril._"

"Now, now. I took counsel among my colleagues at the Ministry as to how much they allowed for _their_ daughters, just to establish a vague idea mind you, and – "

"_Yes?_"

"...I took the highest amount and, ah, quadrupled it? It didn't seem _right_, you know, to give her _only_ as much as the best that someone else's daughter got – "

"Cyril. Your daughter _bribed every barber in the city limits to not cut my hair._"

"Enterprising little thing, isn't she? One must wonder where she found the time..."

"Yes. One _must._"

The house of Prime Minister Cyril Kamelot was run with martinet efficiency by Frau Alfrida Frielinghaus, the sort of woman for whom the term 'battleaxe' had been coined sometime shortly after the actual invention of that implement, the heiress to an ancient and proud Germanic tradition of producing perfectly terrifying female house-servants that no one in their right mind wished to cross either in matters of household management or personal propriety. Under her iron-handed governorship, the household staff – a small army of more than fifty indoor servants, most of them young, Germanic women learning at the knee of a master how to be traumatically vigorous old, Germanic women – kept the manor in a manner that would cast no shame on the name of the man they called their master: the floors and wainscoting never failed to gleam with beeswax polish, the carpeting was never besmirched with the slightest trace of fireplace or tobacco ash, no dust or cobwebs obscured the exquisite plasterwork medallions on the ceilings or the woodwork of the cornices or any of the other numerous architectural embellishments that visitors politely marvelled over. When visitors came to stay – as they often did these days – they were housed in rooms where every luxury of modern civilization was afforded for their comfort and the satisfaction of any want was no more than a bell-pull away. She was aided in her endeavours by Seighard, the butler, whose command of the menservants was as thorough and as comprehensive as her management of the women; between them, there was little that they – or someone they set to a task – could not accomplish if they set their minds to it.

It was therefore a matter of considerable scandal when, one morning, Frau Frielinghaus came below-stairs with the intent of taking stock of the household accounts for market-day and found, within the confines of the little room where the accounting-books were kept, the Minister's younger brother. He stopped what the was doing – and what he was doing appeared to be rooting about in the drawers, evidently looking for something – at once upon her entry, gave her a courtesy, mumbled something vaguely reminiscent of an apology, and hurried out. Later that day, while bustling about the house in her capacity as overseer, she chanced to encounter him again: this time in the _kitchen_ of all places. Again, he was ransacking the drawers, this time the cutlery drawers, and again made a speedy exit – this time under the cover of the cook's assault upon her person, complaining loudly and Frenchly about the thieving house staff, whom he claimed to have absconded with all the meat knives. By the time she sorted that mess out – and it was quite a mess, all the meat knives were found eventually, though everyone was at a loss over how they came to be suspended in the ornamental garden well, beneath the surface of the water in a canvas sack – it was actually quite late in the afternoon, nearly dinner time, when Lady Tricia rang for her. The Lady had managed to mislay her embroidery scissors. It rapidly became apparent, from there, that it was not only the Lady's scissors that had gone missing: her own pairs were gone also, as well as those used by assorted maids throughout the day as a part of their work, and every sort of kitchen shear used by the cook and his assistants, and even the clippers used by the coachman to trim the horses' hooves, tails, and manes. Dinner that night was an uncomfortable affair, attended to by a staff of house-servants in various states of anguish.

It was late that night, nearly time for retirement, when the _Minister himself_ came down below stairs, looking somewhat shamefaced and carrying a leather satchel containing forty-three pairs of scissors and an assortment of other sharp implements. They agreed, between themselves, that the rest of the staff deserved both an apology and a holiday and, probably, a considerable raise.

Among those servants, it was generally acknowledged that the Minister's younger brother, Sir Tyki, was the easiest member of his immediate family to tend to, as he had few needs and even fewer demands, being the sort of man prone to rising and dressing himself without the assistance of a valet, entertaining himself without the need of a maid much to their disgruntlement, and usually doing his own shopping rather than burdening anyone with a thousand and one requests. It was, all things considered, positively indecent: the man didn't even _pretend_ to need someone to tell him which waistcoat to wear, rolled his own cigarettes, and, it was generally understood but never said, could beat soundly at cards any man on the staff, no matter how skilled a sharp they thought they were otherwise. It was therefore an issue of some surprise when, late one evening, he summoned assistance to his private suite of rooms, where it was known that he was bathing. The maids drew lots and the victor, flushed with triumph, hurried up the stairs. A quarter of an hour later, to the very great surprise of all, she hurried back _down_ stairs and into the sewing-room, emerging shortly thereafter with a length of blue silk ribbon, and disappearing into the family quarters yet again. Then next morning it was, according to the footmen waiting at breakfast, a matter of debate who squealed more loudly in delight – the Minister or his daughter – when Sir Tyki came down to dine with his unruly mess of long black hair neatly combed back from his face and confined in a perfectly elegant plait that fell almost to the middle of his back, tied off with an elaborate knot of blue silk.

Later that evening, as Frau Frielinghaus, Joszef, and Seighard sat taking their evening tea together they all agreed: Sir Tyki's hair had always suited him far better short.


End file.
